I was watching a French TV show on homemade treats the other day and one of the recipes was for chouquettes. Chou-what? Yes, I know. If you live in the US, you’ve probably never heard of chouquettes… and it’s a shame. Chouquettes are a essentially a sugar-covered cream puff…without the cream. You just pop them in your mouth until they’re all gone. And that’s really the only problem with chouquettes. Once you start eating one, you can’t stop and soon the whole bag is gone. Actually, you can’t even buy one chouquette in France. That’s right, you buy them by weight. They’re so addictive that bakeries gave up on counting them for you. It’s their way of saying “who are we kidding, how about a bag-full?” At this point, I feel like bakeries should just measure them in minutes on the treadmill. “What will you have today?” “Oh…I think I’ll have a baguette and 40 minutes of cardio worth of chouquettes, s’il vous plait” So here it is, a super easy, super fast recipe for French Chouquettes:
- 1 cup water
- 1 stick of butter (113g)
- 1¼ cup flour (150g)
- 2 tbsp sugar
- Pinch of salt
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 3 eggs
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- Preheat your oven to 400 degrees F. In a medium nonstick saucepan, melt butter in water. Bring to a boil. In the meantime, mix together flour, sugar, salt and baking powder.
- As soon as water/butter mixture boils, remove from the burner and dump in your flour mixture. Using a wooden spoon, stir to combine. You will get a puffy ball of dough that comes off the sides of your saucepan easily. Let it cool to a little warmer than room temperature.
- Add 1 egg and stir to combine. Wait until the egg is completely incorporated before adding the next egg. Repeat.
- Using 2 spoons, an ice cream scoop or a piping bag, dump little balls of dough (about ¾" wide) onto a parchment-lined baking sheet. Cover each ball with sugar. Bake for 15 minutes.
Preheat your oven to 400 degrees F. In a medium nonstick saucepan, melt butter in water:
Bring to a boil. In the meantime, mix together flour, sugar, salt and baking powder.
As soon as your water/butter mixture boils, remove the pan from the burner and dump in your flour mixture:
Using a wooden spoon, stir to combine. You will get a puffy ball of dough that comes off the sides of your saucepan easily:
Let it cool to a little warmer than room temperature. The reason for that added patience is that the next step is adding the eggs. If you don’t wait for the flour butter puff (wow, that would make a great nickname, but I digress), you’ll pieces of scrambled eggs. Not pretty.
Add 1 egg and stir to combine. Wait until the egg is completely incorporated before adding the next egg. Repeat:
Using 2 spoons, an ice cream scoop or a piping bag, dump little balls of dough (about 3/4″ wide) onto a parchment-lined baking sheet:
Cover each ball with sugar. It gives the chouquettes their sugary bite and adds a nice crunch.
In France they use “sugar pearls”, which are really big sugar crystals. Yeah, good luck finding that here =) If you have a good case of OCD, you could stab sugar cubes with a pairing knife to get nice chunks. I find that raw sugar is a good substitute. Today I am using some shimmering sugar from Williams-Sonoma. They’re really large sugar crystals so it worked:
Bake for 15 minutes.
Looking back, I should have brushed them with an egg wash but that gives me an excuse to make more. Oh well.
Au Revoir!!!
These look so fun and easy! I’m planning on making them for a weekend afternoon snack soon!
You can actually find “Pearl Sugar” at most grocery stores in the US. I know Safeway, Whole Foods and Kroger all carry them in the “ethnic food” sections…strange place I know but there it is.
Thanks Chase! I’ll be sure to check that out.
3 eggs is a bit much I think if you are using large eggs. I ended up with yummy wafer thin cookies tho!
Hi Jena,
How weird! Wafer cookies are good but fluffy puffs would be better =)
I googled other recipes to check how many eggs other bakers use. Turns out most bakers use 4 eggs (I am using 3 in this recipe).
Most use 4: http://www.chow.com/recipes/28324-chouquettes or http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2009/01/sugar-puffs/
some even go up to 5!!: http://iamafoodblog.com/chouquette-recipe/
I am making eclairs this week so I’ll try both 3 and 4 eggs to see the difference. Stay tuned… =)
I did follow the recipe to a T, but the batter was too watery. The consistency was just right after adding 2 eggs, and so I say one too many eggs, but it might have been something else (e.g. maybe we differ in how we measure flour?). After spooning out 4 “cookies” onto the sheet, I decided to refrigerate it to see if it would help the batter to keep together better, but that didn’t help much.
I followed the recipe exactly as it is written, but when I was baking, I saw that after the 15 min, mines didn’t look golden on the top. So, I baked them for another 10 mins, but they didn’t change color at all. I ate them anyways, but I was wondering, they’re supposed to be puffy, or crunchy? Cuz I think crunchy would also be tasty and I was wondering what to change in the recipe to get that consistence. Thank you.
H Kairi,
Make sure your oven temperature is accurate. These chouquettes need a nice hot oven to turn the eggs into steam and puff up nicely. I know my oven likes to be creative with temperature sometimes so I keep an oven thermometer in there to be sure.
what kind of flour do you use?
Hi Ariel, just good ol’ All Purpose Flour =)